IN PERFORMANCE

A woman's fantasies and fears take wing in 'Amelia'

It's heartening to see area college and university music programs taking up the slack with respect to significant recent American operas Chicago's professional opera companies have ignored.

A little more than a week ago, student singers and orchestra players of Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music staged a remarkably fine production of "The Grapes of Wrath," composer Ricky Ian Gordon's sprawling adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel. Coincidentally, on Friday and Saturday nights, students from Roosevelt University's Chicago College of Performing Arts presented another Chicago premiere of another recent opera, Daron Hagen's "Amelia."

A previous Hagen opera, "Shining Brow," based on the life of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, was successfully staged by Chicago Opera Theater in 1997, so one approached the composer's latest effort with no little interest. "Amelia" impressed as a serious, poetic and poignantly moving piece about a contemporary woman's coming to terms with the loss of her father, a Navy pilot who went missing after he was shot down during the Vietnam War when she was only nine.

If the student performance, heard Friday night at Benito Juarez Community Academy in the city's Pilsen neighborhood, betrayed technical weaknesses and lacked the polish adult professionals would have brought to this demanding work, it was good enough to reveal the musical and theatrical merits of the piece. One listened beyond the rough patches to get to the emotional truths "Amelia" has to convey.

The first commissioned work in Speight Jenkins' 27 years as general director of Seattle Opera, "Amelia" attracted considerable attention at its world premiere there in 2010. The University of Houston followed with a production of its own in 2012. The original story by Stephen Wadsworth (stage director for Lyric Opera's upcoming world premiere of "Bel Canto") was inspired by the life of poet Gardner McFall, who created the libretto with further shaping by Wadsworth.

The two-act, two-hour opera takes its cue from "Shining Brow," wherein different time periods are represented at the same instant on stage. In "Amelia," dream and reality, past and present, are intertwined; characters are seen and heard together even though they inhabit separate worlds. Flight as a metaphor for the human spirit is its central theme. In one of the work's most inspired touches, the figures of Daedalus and Icarus are seen in their mythic guise and as a father grieving at the bedside of his son, who was gravely injured in a fall from a great height.

For his Seattle Opera commission, Jenkins said he wanted a composer whose music would "walk the narrow line" between fashionable neo-Romanticism and harder-edged modernism; he found such a composer in Hagen. Singable, accessible and deftly crafted, the score balances rhythmic propulsion and lyrical expansion in a manner that sometimes echoes Leonard Bernstein and Ned Rorem, Hagen's former teacher. The orchestral interludes are often laced with turbulent dissonances. Hagen's music advances the emotional urgency of each scene, which is what makes it a real opera, not just a play set to music.

"Amelia" takes some time to get off the ground (so to speak). The first act feels a bit maudlin at times, such as a scene where Amelia's pilot-father, Dodge, sings his beloved daughter to sleep in bed while Navy officers inform her mother that he's missing in action. The piece finds its operatic mojo in the harrowing scene that closes Act 1, where the adult Amelia and her husband, Paul, travel to Vietnam to visit a North Vietnamese couple who give them dire news of Dodge.

About a decade later, the pregnant Amelia, still unable to dispel her lingering fear and anger over her father's disappearance, undergoes a kind of mad scene in which she expresses horror at bringing a child into such an uncertain world. She lapses into unconsciousness and winds up in a hospital bed. In the opera's climactic scene, Dodge appears to his daughter in a dream, giving her the courage to go on, both for her own sake and for that of her unborn child. "Living is hard, dying isn't any better," he tells her.

The 519-seat Performing Arts Center at the Juarez academy proved a suitably intimate space for this stripped-down version of "Amelia." Hagen had reduced the instrumentation by about half for these performances, winding up with an orchestra of 22 players, which was all the pit would allow. The student musicians pitched in valiantly under their able guest conductor, James Paul, but the music is not easy to play and the results sometimes proved thin, scrappy and ill-tuned.